Deadline approaches for declaration of cargo weight

SHIPPERS must ensure that containers comply with the new international Safety of Life at Sea (Solas) verified gross mass regulations (VGM) three days before the July 1 deadline, Transnet Port Terminals (TPT) told port users last Friday.

The regulations have been enacted by the International Maritime Organisation, of which South Africa is a member nation, to mitigate against the misdeclaration of cargo weight that has led to maritime accidents at sea in which ships have gone belly up.

TPT senior manager for strategy, Dr Darren Fraser, told hundreds of port users at a stakeholder meeting in Durban that the port had enforced a June 27 cut-off date from which it would only receive containers which had a pre-advised VGM submitted to the container terminals.

He said the rule was applicable at all of the country’s ports.

Fraser said the container terminal had a 72-hour stack, with exports arriving 72 hours before being loaded on to ships which made it necessary for the port to receive the VGM information in time before the July 1 deadline. The cut off date will apply as a gate rule and any containers in the stack before June 27 that need to be loaded onto vessels will be able to be loaded without the VGM.

“This will be our transitional period, where we can mitigate against having thousands of containers in the terminal without VGM information that we will not be able to load,” he said. Fraser added that TPT did not have any weighing equipment approved by the National Regulator for Compulsory Specifications and would not be re-checking mass in the container terminals.

He said TPT had often been asked whether an extension to the international deadline would be granted and it had posed the question, but “the categorical response has always been no”.

TPT operations general manager for KZN, Zeph Ndlovu, said shippers should already be providing accurate mass to comply with existing maritime legislation and the only change was that the gross mass now had to be verified according to the new international regulations.

Ndlovu said cargo that had been declared to be 15 tons had ended up being 40 tons in some cases, posing a risk to ships and crew in international waters.

“We do not want SA to be identified as a rogue business in maritime terms. It is our responsibility to ensure we are compliant with the international community,” he said.